Monday, 14 July 2014

Utopia Now or Apocalypse Tomorrow: Freedom or Fatherland Insecurity

“I can’t see the human race getting very far, if women are busy making babies while men are busy killing people.”

-Kathleen Azzopardi, age 16

Loving
your country is natural, if you live in a natural landscape. All
landforms and ecosystems are uniquely individual and people who truly live
in them, rooted firmly in the nurturing earth, will always cherish and
defend their homeland, families and traditional lifestyles.

Until less than one generation ago
most humans lived with nature, outside the modern mushrooming
profusion of hive-like cities and towns. More often than not they lived
happy, prosperous and fulfilling lives in mutually supportive groups
of friends and families. A threat to their land was a threat to their
family and their farm, their animals and crops – a threat to their
existence. And the major threat to their pleasant lives was usually a
city-building, dynastically minded empire-builder and his band of
ignorant, willing spear carriers bent on pillage and rape.

Patriotism
– the love of the ancestral parent-land – was used as a tool to
harvest spear and cannon fodder as regularly as possible. The war
machine’s appetite was always voracious and insatiable.

These
monarchic feudal empires ruled essentially unchanged through most of
our histories before being partially reformed into our modern version of
corporate wage-slavery after the Enlightenment.

Rallying
around the flag was a necessity of battle, to be regularly practiced
in the all-too-brief peacetime so that another generation could be
marched into the maw of the beast with a minimum of complaint. The
sporting, playful nature of humans was easily exploited for the
purposes of war.

Regimented
sporting codes enacting regional rivalries on a practice battlefield
were encouraged by the rulers of most nations, to foster a militant and
violently competitive mindset among the people and ensure that young
men were encouraged and rewarded for possessing a near-suicidal lack of
enlightened self-interest and individuality. Violent team sports are
practice for the mindset of war, not a harmless sublimation of it.

Nationalism,
patriotism, racism and religion are the cornerstones of an age-old
propaganda edifice that’s designed to stop humans of different tribes
and races from thinking for themselves – and from learning to actually
like and trust each other. These pernicious fantasies have very
effectively impeded the unification of humanity in its race toward a
millennial new age of peace, prosperity and familiarity – of fairness
and compassion – until now.

Now
we have to replace these outmoded notions with much better concepts – a
unified healthy planet, a noble species of sisters and brothers with
awareness beyond mere materialism, educated in the undeniable facts of
our truly remarkable existence and potential. Our true heritage and
birthright is greater than we can currently imagine; a caterpillar can’t
even see the butterfly.

Nation states do not actually exist.
Nations are merely notions, ideas that exist in no landscape but that
of the habituated human mind. In such a notional state so-called
patriots and soldiers are rewarded with an utterly undeserved
credibility and trust, just as sportsmen and women are treated as great
leaders and worthy sages for the duration of their prosaic lives.

Nationalism is nothing more than an excuse to believe in an illusory us and them.
There’s no honour, nobility or valour involved – loving your imaginary
nation is the result of a hypnotic command that uses inflated,
self-important racism to excuse murder, theft and extortion. Nationalism
always creates a supposedly credible enemy for little girls and boys
to demonise and to fantasise slaying in excruciating detail – and our innocent thoughts make the world.

If
all nations did what they claim as a sovereign right and simply
defended their own territory and homeland, no war could ever occur. But
defense is not what having a military force is for in our post-modern world.

Patriotism is merely a pat excuse to riot and cause mayhem in the name of the paterfamilias and padrone,
the father, fatherland and fuehrer – usually an old, lonely, blind,
hidebound, vengeful psychotic with antisocial tendencies; the monomaniac
leading the blind.

These
are standard primate traits; not hard-wired behaviour but default
settings that are easily tripped by fearful ignorance. Height makes
might makes right and the rest is window-dressing and uniforms covering
up an essentially mindless, reptilian territorialism that has no ethic
but the satisfaction of its own reflexive, insatiable desires.

All
our mass beliefs, education and political systems are based on
religiously followed lies and self-deceptions, designed to make people
fracture themselves into a false hierarchy of castes and classes, winners and losers, victims and victors.

Our
warriors are blind killer apes, our priests are lunatics baying at the
moon and our leaders are old terrified self-aggrandising assholes
shitting on everyone else from the top of the tree, marking territory.

You know it’s true. We’re all one people, with shared emotions, dreams, hopes and aspirations,
fractured into a fearful, clamorous Babel of broken mirrors by the
lies and errors of those who preceded us. There’s no point respecting
leaders of the past or present, no point listening to their vaporous
self-serving mockery of intelligent discourse - or in showering them
with spirit money or campaign contributions.

The vast majority of all our
ancestors were mainly blind, reflexive automatons doing nothing more
than their equally robotic predecessors. Today’s leaders and followers
are just the same old dinosaurs tarted up in less ornate finery, sucking
the cream off our collective mother’s milk at our expense. They’re
lying front-men for the industrialist robber barons, weapon makers and
corporate gangsters that despise and fear the rest of Humanity - and
who would rather be rid of the majority of us.

Our
veneration may be better reserved for the truly deserving visionaries
who improve the lot of all humanity at the expense of no-one – those
who question and consider, create and experiment; those who examine
themselves, nature - and their own nature. Of course, it’s much harder
to recall the name of a single one of these individuals than to remember
the name of a myriad of sportspeople, generals or delusional religious
figures.

Religious
dogmas – ‘faiths’ - are nothing more than regional lies told by the
blind, the misled and the control freaks of a bygone era. The truth will
set you free from the desire for faith. Certainty is much more
satisfying and is found in the simplest things by those who really want
to root their belief systems in knowledge of the nature of reality – not the nursery rhymes of paedophiles.

Seek the truth in geometry, the
substrates and matrices of our existence – the subject leads to other
planes of awareness that reveal unexpected pathways through the
multifaceted maze between here and tomorrow.

The
true shakers and movers of history are largely invisible to us, shoved
aside by the makers and shovers who ensure their names occupy every
billboard - and that’s actually a good thing, because the victor
goes to spoilage and corruption at the focus of the undying attention
lavished upon them by a servile, adulating, sub-adult population of
hypnotised slaves and servants. The hero is always nailed to the cross
of mass expectation and prejudice, gaining power and glory at the
expense of freedom and inspiration – or tripping and falling over feet
of clay.

This
catalogue of woefully repeated ancestral errors only works within
unenlightened cultures whose parents allow their children to be ‘taught’
in systems designed as religious programming or job training for
automatons. We need to expose our children to fresh concepts in places
and mindsets that are carefully crafted for the edification and
education of young minds with unexplored potential in a world where
anything is possible – not institutions that subject them to being
subject to subjects.

Today’s
schools and universities are the bastard offspring of arrogant
industry and self-serving charity, bricks in the wall that separate us
into haves and have-nots. They divide the best sponge-like young minds
into separate streams and dead-end specialisations, blocking the
development of a well-rounded intellect and life, rechanneling it into a
careering, unsteerable vehicle that temporarily serves the purposes of
industry.

It’s the old methodology of divide and conquer
applied to the brightest minds and the truest, most innocent alliance
of truth-seekers, lost in the fossilising shadow-maze of the ivory
tower.Rigid specialisation is the opposite of adaptation and synthesis; it’s the worst survival mechanism in a changing paradigm.

Specialisation creates hierarchy and hierarchies are designed to impede change and maintain the status quo of stasis.If
you think someone is an inferior or superior when you communicate with
them you end up learning nothing; the worth of the information is
already compartmentalised, pre-judged and prejudiced - not explored for
its intrinsic value and qualities.If you assume the person you’re communicating with is a free, coequal and consciously living
being there’s a much better likelihood of fruitful synergy. Friendly
interest arouses friendly interest and free thought and communication
creates unexpected hybridisation and catalysis.

We
don’t need hierarchies any more. We’re all one people, similar in our
diversity and united in our sense of unique difference. We’ve outgrown
our blind larval past and unless we change our ways now most of us are
going to starve to death and die in the wars that will erupt when the
food and other prime resources jam up in the inevitable human-created
bottlenecks looming in our near future.

Would you prefer it wasn’t you
that’s passing their precious time rearranging deckchairs while the
coal-fired ship’s master keeps yelling ‘Full steam ahead’? Would you
prefer it was someone else? Do you see the bald, blind imperative
illogic of ‘us’ and ‘them’, when we’re all on the same Titanic vessel in
an uncharitable sea?We
don’t have to take that path; there’s a steering wheel and the future
sea has no fixed roads, only currents and tides, icebergs and
landfalls.

We can develop a new system,
a truly new world order based on freedom and chaotic creativity, a
new, truer democracy that votes for issues, not faces – one that votes
early and often, not for parties or clans but for the betterment of all
and a fair distribution of resources and trade in a chaotic state of
increasing abundance. The skills to make a new Humanity are well-known
and available to us all now – if we seek them.

With clean, free energy and fuels at our disposal and a real commitment to sustainable abundance the entire world can
live at the standard of living of middle-class Americans without
trashing or utterly transforming the ecosystem. The technology is all
waiting for us, sat on and bought out and hidden for decades by the
fearful old fossil-fuel dinosaurs. We don’t need them – and that’s what
they fear the most.

Utopia
is easily achievable. All we have to do is transform and educate
ourselves. We can stabilise and enrich the environment and our cultures
into a dynamically productive and creative utopia and transform our
lives. We can discover the meaning and challenge of leisure time – another term for freedom. We’ll even find new things to dream and complain about.

We
can make it happen. All the tools are at our disposal, fully developed
and waiting for us to pick up and use. All it takes is a willing and
educated population, a free media, unilateral disarmament and a totally
transparent and continually examined computerised voting system – all
on a global scale and in your local neighbourhood.It takes a representative world governance – not a government - of all the diverse human tribes, united under the expansive umbrella of the already existing International Bill of Rights
– a document that already protects our rights and freedoms and is
responsible for most of the great advances of the last half century
(that everyone’s taken for granted as unexpected benisons of their own
credit-taking individual governments).

All it takes to live in paradise on Earth is for you to examine your self and your mind, suspend your belief and disbelief, and listen to your unknown neighbour.All
it takes is for you to consider the possibilities – and look inside
your heart. Is a freely shared world of free, caring beings what you
want? Are you ready to change jobs, to vote with your time and
work in a field that transforms the world for the better instead of one
that’s polluting and destroying it - or feeding or servicing those who
are?

Are
you ready to discard homeland insecurity with the other rotten
fear-filled rags of the past and emerge naked and innocent into a
strange, new and fundamentally unknowable dawn?

The
question is the same whether you’re a princess or a pauper. What’s the
answer? Can you come up with a better alternative than radical
transmutation – given where we’re at right now? Or do you prefer the
known ‘alternative’ of the same old feudal nightmare leading to the
ragged hole?

You
won’t need to remember where it was that you read this diatribe, one
day in the future when it all makes sense – for better or worse. This
author doesn’t particularly want to be noticed or remembered; eye for
one intend to be alive and happy in a world inhabited by a prosperous, improving Humanity! How about you?Do you dare to dream of paradise now?